1579- Sir Francis Drake, his ship the Golden Hind parked in Drake's Bay or Anchor Bay or wherever, claims California for England. He calls it Nova Albion. Early explorers thought America was one big island. Magellan had found the way around the southern tip. Drake repeated Magellan's route around South America to attack Panama and the Peruvian treasure fleet. After which he sailed north trying to find the northern end of the island so he could sail around the top to get back into the Atlantic.
By Mendocino California, Drake realized that this was one big mother of an island, and it would be wiser to turn around and go home another way. The Northwest Passage isn't discovered until Canadian icebreaker does it in 1958.

1778- MOTHER ENGLAND OFFERS A DEAL- After the French, Dutch and Spanish decide to intervene in the American Revolution, and pile on Britain, The British Government under Lord North offered the rebellious American colonies all of their grievances, taxation, seats in Parliament. Everything short of full independence. The Continental Congress says too late, you're dealing with a separate country now.

1779- British General Sir Henry Clinton had a problem. He had just captured Charleston South Carolina and accepted the surrender of the largest number of American rebels- 4,000, as many as his own army. Now orders came from London were to leave Lord Cornwallis with a force to subdue the South and return to New York. But what about the prisoners? Today Clinton published an edict that all rebels who take an oath of loyalty to the Crown will be released. His subordinate grumbled:” Sir Henry doesn’t understand that these rebels swallow an oath to their King then an oath to their Congress with the same ease his Lordship swallows a plate of poached eggs!”

1800- President John Adams arrived in the Washington D.C. area and took up residence at the Union Tavern in Georgetown while waiting for construction to be completed on the Executive Mansion, later called the White House. First Lady Abigail Adams and her suite got lost in the forest coming from Baltimore.
There were only then three thousand residents in DC, one fifth were slaves. Pennsylvania Avenue was “wide morass confused with alder bushes”. The only way to understand where the avenues were from the wooden pegs sticking in the mud. Secretary to the British Ambassador Augustus John Forster wrote to London forlornly that he was losing his sanity in this “absolute sepulchre, this rural hole.”

1846- General Stephan Kearny with his Army of the West in Texas, received orders from Washington to invade the Mexican state of California.

1851- The American clipper ship Flying Cloud began her maiden voyage from Sandy Hook New York. She was so fast she could sail from New York around South America to San Francisco in 89 days, making her the most celebrated Yankee merchant ship, and with the British Cutty Sark the subject of numerous model boat kits.

1864- BATTLE OF COLD HARBOR- The Civil War battles between Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant had settled into something resembling the trench warfare of World War 1. This day General Grant, mistakenly believing Lee was abandoning his impregnable Petersburg defense lines, launched huge frontal attacks near Cold Harbor.
Seven thousand men were cut down in 20 minutes. Before rising from their fortifications to the attack, Union men wrote their names on pieces of paper and pinned them to their shirts so their bodies could later be identified. One Massachusetts private wrote in his journal: "June 3rd. I was killed today." He went out and was indeed killed. By the third assault the Yankee army was near mutiny. A captain reacted to the order to attack: "I won't go back out there if Christ Almighty himself came down and ordered me to!"

In two months battle Grant had lost 20,000 men, more than Lee had in his entire army. The newspapers started to call him “the Butcher”. But Grant knew if he held on, he would defeat the Confederacy, if only by sheer weight of numbers. Still, for the rest of his life he regretted his attack at Cold Harbor.

1875- Harper's Weekly Newspaper reported the Kansas Pacific Railroad was bowing to editorial pressure from back east and would no longer allow it's passengers to shoot at buffalo from their moving trains. It had become quite a tourist attraction.

1885- Feast of the Martyrs of Uganda- Ugandan king Mwanga got angry that too many Christian missionaries were running around his kingdom. One of the royal pages who had been converted even had the audacity to baptize Mwanga's son Kizito. So he ordered dozens of them burnt alive or chopped up. His chief steward Joseph said as he perished:" Mwanga has condemned me without cause, but tell him I forgive him from my heart."
Mwanga's persecution stopped when the British invaded later that year and turned Uganda into a colony until 1956.

1888-The poem: "Casey at the Bat" by Edward Lawrence Thayer published in the San Francisco Examiner.

1898- While Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders waited at Tampico Florida to embark for Cuba, an interesting meeting occurred. One of the U.S. army’s commanders was an ex-Confederate general named Fighting Joe Wheeler. Wheeler encountered another elderly retired rebel General James Longstreet. The two joked about Jubal Early, a hotheaded comrade of theirs. Longstreet said: “Joe, I hope I die before you do, because I want to get to Hell in time to hear Jubal Early curse you for wearing that pretty Blue Uniform !!”

1923- Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini gave Italian women the right to vote.

1924- THE FIRST D.J.- Moses Biaritz, working for the BBC affiliate in Manchester England, started a radio program where he spun records and chatted in-between song cuts, inventing the Disc Jockey format.

1924- Writer Franz Kafka died in Keirling Austria. He left instructions to
Friends to burn all his unfinished manuscripts including The Trial, but
Fortunately, his friends did not.

1929- Movie stars Douglas Fairbanks Jr married Joan Crawford.

1928- General Chang Zhou Lin “The Old Marshal” was one of the last Chinese warlords to give in to the ascendant Kuomintang Nationalist front led by Chiang Kai Shek. Chang Zhou Lin yielded his control of Peking on a promise he could retire in peace. But soon after boarding a train to Manchuria he was killed by a bomb. It was blamed on Japanese agents but no one is sure. The intrigue and internal chaos of the time inspired several films and novels like Shanghai Express, the Bitter Tea of General Yen and Lost Horizons.

1932- In a game against the Philadelphia A’s, NY Yankee hitter Tony Lazzeri hit “for the cycle” a natural cycle. This meaning his first at bat was a single, the second a double, his third a triple and his fourth at bat he hit a home run, a grand slam actually. In all 150 years of recorded baseball, only 14 batters have ever hit a natural cycle.

1937- King Edward VIII of England had abdicated his throne over his affair with American divorcee Wallis Simpson. Now as Duke of Windsor, he and Wally were married this day.

1939- Movie director Alexander Korda married movie star Merle Oberon.

1942- Japanese planes bomb Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands, part of Alaskan territory. This attack was supposed to be the feint drawing attention from the main Japanese attack at Midway Island.

1943- First Day of the ZOOT SUIT RIOTS- In Los Angeles, Navy and Marine servicemen awaiting embarkation to the Pacific battlegrounds clashed with Hispanic gangs. Truckloads of off-duty servicemen drove up from San Pedro Harbor to enlarge the fight. The servicemen would choose whom to beat up based on whether they were wearing a fashionable zoot-suit. They beat up two 13 year olds sitting in a theater watching a movie. Downtown L.A. became an urban war zone for several days.

1944- Meteorologists in Norway predict a storm system over Europe to last all week. German High Command was sure an invasion of Europe was imminent but that Eisenhower would need at least 4 days of good weather to launch an attack. The original date for D-Day was supposed to be tomorrow June 4th but this night Eisenhower canceled the go-ahead until June 6th. The tides would never be this favorable again until September. Field Marshal Rommel, deciding there would be no invasion that week, goes home to Germany for conferences and his wife's birthday, June 6th.

1946- THE BIKINI went on sale. Parisian designer Jacques Castel invented the two piece women’s bathing suit. Named the Bikini for the Atomic test in the Bikini islands, Castel said it would "hit the fashion world like an atomic bomb". The first model to wear it was a stripper, because the regular fashion models refused to parade around in 'Castel's flimsy straps'.

1946- A consumer study finds there are only 10,000 television sets in America.
A follow up study five years later finds the number at 12 million.

1948- The Hale telescope at the Mount Palomar Observatory in California dedicated. The 200 inch mirror had taken 11 years to polish and the observatory two decades to build. Called the “Giant Eye” it gave us out first looks at nebulae, black holes and doubled our depth perception of the size of the Universe.

1949 - Dragnet is 1st broadcast on radio ( KFI in Los Angeles ). Creator Jack Webb wanted to capture the dry, non-theatrical delivery he heard real cops use. He ordered his actors to “stop acting, just read the lines”. Webb wrote the scripts from real LAPD cases and starred as well.

1965- Edward White becomes the first American to walk in space in Gemini VII.

1980- President Jimmy Carter announced the United States would boycott the 1980 summer Olympic Games in Moscow because of the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. The Russians boycotted the LA Olympics in 1984.

1982- Schlomo Argov, Israeli ambassador to Britain, was shot outside of a London Hotel. Tensions had been building up between Israel and the Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Org. based in South Lebanon. Defense minister Arial Sharon planned an invasion of Lebanon, and was waiting for one more incident to spark it off. In the cabinet meeting over the killing, Mossad tried to point out that the assassin was identified as an Abu Nidal terrorist, who were enemies of the PLO. Prime Minister Menachem Begin waved them off.” They are all PLO”. The Israeli tanks rolled two days later. The War in Lebanon dragged on for twenty years, splintering Israeli opinion.

1986- Attorney Roy Cohn was disbarred by a federal appellate court. It was a symbolic act because Cohn was dying of HIV/AIDS. In his career Cohn had prosecuted the Rosenbergs, helped Sen Joe McCarthy in his anti-Communist witch hunt and defended Mafia dons like John Gotti. Despite being gay himself, one of Cohn’s last acts was to lobby New York State legislators from his deathbed to defeat a Gay Rights Bill. His end was dramatized in the play Angels in America. Cohn was a mentor to young Donald Trump.
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Yesterday’s Quiz- Which one of these German expats in Hollywood was a real German Junker, i.e. nobleman? Erich von Stronheim, Otto Preminger, Frank Tashlin, Billy Wilder, Werner Klemperer (Col. Klink)

Answer: Frank Tashlin’s original name was Franz Friederich Von Taschlein. The family lived in New Jersey and changed it in 1917 because of the anti-German sentiment from World War I.